SLOWmail

by slowLab (Carolyn Strauss and Julian Bleecker)
http://www.slowlab.net/slowmail.html

SLOWmail is a new email service that deliberately slows down the pace of electronic messaging. It operates at the opposite end of the time-to-delivery spectrum from traditional email, offering a more reflective experience for both sender and recipient, and challenging forth more artful and meaningful correspondence. SLOWmail leverages social software practices and idioms—ontologies, semantic tagging, media sharing, presence awareness—seeking not to supplant other forms of electronic contact, but rather to complement them. As platforms like IM and SMS increase in popularity, SLOWmail explores the possibilities of less instantaneity and more calm in communication, creating a new rhythm of social interaction.

Julian Bleecker and Carolyn Strauss Bios
slowLab is an emerging New York City arts organization dedicated to creative innovation that cultivates slower rhythms and expressions to balance today's fast flows of information and the increasing speed of daily encounters, while also fostering awareness of their longer term impacts. By revealing and enabling processes and products of 'slow design', slowLab provides members of the public with new opportunities for creative engagement and activism. slowLab is sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), which since 1971 has functioned as a creative development corporation, helping the arts to flourish in New York State as well as nationally.

Julian Bleecker is a creative technologist with over 20 years of hands-on experience exploring the use of technologies to create new, exciting kinds of social formations and ways of circulating culture. His background in electrical engineering and computer science, coupled with work on emerging technology design allows him to provide a unique perspective on the near-future possibilities of technology-based mobile, location-based, social and networked applications, products and services. Bleecker currently heads the Mobile and Pervasive Lab, a near-future think tank and research and development lab at the School of Cinema-TV and the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California.

Carolyn Strauss is founder and Executive Director of slowLab. She is an instructor of design at the Parsons School of Design in New York and the Icelandic Academy of Arts in Reykjavik. She is a former fellow of the XDesign studio at Yale University Faculty of Engineering, and has been a visiting lecturer and workshop facilitator at the Cooper Union School of Art, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and many others. She continues to lecture, conduct wokshops and develop slow design curricula for several notable institutions.